


Prompt: Remember

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Codependency, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:10:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda got out and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Others trained, others enhanced, those she could leave behind. But her <i>brother</i>… she had hoped her power might protect him from their warping, might let her stop them, but when they strapped him to a chair, and wave after blinding wave started stealing and sealing his memories away she saved all she could of him and ran.</p><p>She loved her brother, yes, she loved him more than life itself, but she had to remain whole to save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Remember

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt, readable at my tumblr [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/135458261815/prompt-brainwashed-assassins-because-i-am-evil). Comments are ever appreciated.

**i.  
** Wanda got out and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Others trained, others enhanced, those she could leave behind. But her  _brother_ … she had hoped her power might protect him from their warping, might let her stop them, but when they strapped him to a chair, and wave after blinding wave started stealing and sealing his memories away she saved all she could of him and ran.

She loved her brother, yes, she loved him more than life itself, but she had to remain whole to save him.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
When Pietro wakes it is with no memories, but a sense that something is missing. The techs around him murmur things to each other, dart worried glances to him and away, and think he will not notice without memories as he is. 

They forget his gift, his speed, and that, as he is relearning, some things run deeper than mere memory.

Pietro knows he has lost something - lost some _one_  - even if he cannot remember her face or name.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.  
** She hears of what they do, down alleyways, through streets, in the minds of those she passes. The silver blur, the darting soldiers and then a death and nothing more. Her brother, her protector a murderer, trapped in a team of them. Trapped tracking her. Wanda runs further, and tried not to hate the fact she was fleeing her brother.

 

* * *

 

 **iv** **.**  
He is assigned a team - one like him he, learns over time, one without memories - and sent on jobs. There is Ursula, stronger than anyone, and Casimir not as fast, but almost as nimble as he. There are others, without powers, but also without memories, and Pietro learns how to work with them, plan with them, kill with them, as their orders are given.

He tries to ignore the itch in his mind that says he should be doing things differently, doing them for one person, rather than a group, and that the one person wasn’t there.

He is glad his speed means his slip-ups aren’t noticed.

 

* * *

 

 **v.  
** Less advanced, more advanced, less tech, more tech, less people, more people, Wanda runs and hides in the ways she had told her brother of but never explained. She guided them, he guarded them, and he had never quite understood how she decided what they must do.

That was the only thing saving her now.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
Pietro cannot see the sense behind the pattern his team is sent out. Almost every day they are given new orders, told to go somewhere else, and always after the same woman. Dark hair, dark eyes ( _grey_ he thinks, and sometimes,  _brown_ , but it is hard to be certain), slender and fast. Pietro wonders at that. She is fast - not like he is, superhumanly - but in a way that suggests she  _knows_  of speed like his. He tries to plan around it, tries going faster or slower, but, somehow, she always slips through their fingers.

It does not help, he thinks, that the techs insist on running those blinding, headache-inducing checks after each job.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Sometimes Wanda wonders why they had taken her brother first, strapped him to the chair, wiped his mind. They must have known she would sense it. They _must_  have, they had seen her scarlet break bones when they had tried to hurt Pietro, even when she could not see. Had they feared he would run with his new speed if they did not? That he would have left her behind? Wanda knows he never would, never  _could_. He had crafted himself from when they were  _ten_ , long years of denying himself this and that and this other, simply to protect her. He had made her his pole star, his guiding light.

It wasn’t as simple as that he wouldn’t leave her, that he  _might not_  leaver her. It was instead that he  _couldn’t_.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
Pietro’s headaches after each job do not make it easier to track her down. His speed may let him heal faster, but the headaches are never quite gone before they strap him back into the chair and run whatever checks it is they do. He knows he woke in the chair, without any memories, and begins to wonder if that is what the chair is for.

To hide a past, or to remove it entirely.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
Sometimes Wanda considers making herself bait. Letting them come for her and capture her, and then thrusting all Pietro’s memories that she had saved back into his mind. She has taken time to train what she can, eked thoughts from his mind when he was in range, learned his training and that of the team he now runs with, learned how to use a scope and a sniper rifle, and track people by their minds to find them and to kill them. She is not the best of shots but then she does not need to be. 

She can make them stand still for her, after all.

She considers being bait, considers dangling her trailing scarlet before her brother like the scent and spoor of blood, and letting him run wreathed in silver towards her. With him going at that speed… she would have moments maybe, mere moments to remake his mind to how it had been, with its great grey tree and blue leaves and glasslike hummingbirds, and the waiting mezuzah at the brink of it all.

Moments, she decides, will have to be enough.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
They have not been sent out for a week, and Pietro’s headache is quite gone when they next receive word of where the woman hides. She is in Sokovia, they learn, hiding in the alleys and abandoned homes, and sometimes spotted in the abandoned church.

Pietro, they decide, should go in first. He is faster, after all, and can tranq her before she even knows what happened.

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Wanda sits in the church that evening in perfect silence. She is combing through her mind, stripping out the church façade she has let grow there since she was small. She studies the church around her and pulls out all the parts she can see she has drawn from it - the pulpit and the choir stands and the font, the small curlicues near the ceiling and the crossways arch that holds the vault up. Wanda draws scarlet wings and scarlet claws over dark stone and cradles the silver fragments than come forth as the stone crumbles away.

When she is done her mind is as it had been, a synagogue. The faith that shaped her even if she could not Believe any longer. For this though, for this she needed to Believe, believe truly that she would have a chance to save her brother. 

 _Siblings should not fight, after all_ , she thinks, and sends her scarlet spinning out to find her brother.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
Pietro is kitted out, and holds the tranq dart carefully in his hand. His feet are jittering they way they do when he is truly uncertain, an unrestfulness that tends to worry the rest of the team. He flashes them a quick smile, laughs at Casimir’s attempted joke, and stands. 

“The church?” he asks and Ursula nods. 

“The church.”

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
Wanda feels him coming, the sliver of darting silver, slipping through the city. _Brother-mine_ , her mind says,  _brother-mine, brother-mine, brother-mine, what have they **done**  to you?_

There is no tree in his mind, there is not even an island, or single lone hummingbird left. There is a desert, and Wanda wants to weep it back to life.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Pietro gets to the church at is met by a wave of scarlet. There is static in his ear as the tiniest tendril twists and crushes the earpiece, and the woman stands before him, eyes red, hands red, dressed in red, as though she was War made to life.

“Oh, Pietro,” she whispers. “What have they done to you?”

He is still,  _held_  still, and cannot move in the scarlet that holds him from the ground, holds him in place so he cannot gain traction and try again. The woman peels open his fingers, rolls the tranq between her own before tossing it in the air for her scarlet to crush. 

“I wonder,” she says, voice still so soft, “Did they decide that for you, or did you choose on your own?”

Pietro does not answer, but the woman waves a hand. “It does not matter. Either way, you would never hurt me.”

Her eyes are dark and touched with red when they look into his. “Would you, brother of mine?”

 

* * *

 

 **xv.**  
She has had more than moments, and Wanda does not know if she quite believes it. She got first strike, her scarlet  _held him_ , and Wanda tries to decide how she should give her brother back his memory. His team would, no doubt, be coming for her soon. She thinks she can feel them, minds like ants, prickling their way towards them both. Wanda cradles her brother’s face in her hands.

“You must  _remember_ ,” she says, and lets her scarlet strike him.

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.**  
Pietro did not quite understand what was happening, what even… his mind was changing, warping, the fragments he had been taught flying up like sand in a storm, something else raining down in red and blue and silver and  _love love love_  and  _Wanda_  is there before him and he  _knows_.

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.**  
“We have to leave,” he says and Wanda relaxes. His tree is still growing, rising up from the great well of  _love_  she has re-dug for him and filled with her own scarlet even before she hit his upwelling blue, but he is back and he is her brother. Wanda nods.

“Get us away,” she says, and there is nothing but Pietro’s silver speed, and their shared safety.

 

* * *

 


End file.
